Your Hand in Mine
by July Storms
Summary: Tonight the question is, "Have you ever met someone, and it was like…you just know that you were supposed to meet them?" Mike x Nanaba Reincarnation AU. Mentions of Levihan.


**Your Hand in Mine**

**Prompt**: Mike x Nanaba reincarnation 'fic. For Pollyannaisms on Tumblr.

**Notes**: This is just silly, cute, mostly-fluffy stuff. It's written from Nanaba's perspective and also contains some Levihan. Hange is referred to as "Zoë" in this story since I believe it's her first name and that she'd be more likely to go by it in a modern setting.

* * *

"Have you ever…"

Their conversations don't always start this way, but it's happened often enough that Nanaba's convinced that Zoë needs to lay off the caffeine and go to bed at a proper hour.

They're stocking the shelves of a grocery store, one on each side of the aisle. Nanaba's going to college part-time, and Zoë's just not sure what she wants to do, yet. They're working third shift, the shift nobody else likes, the shift Nanaba absolutely hates because she prefers the mornings or afternoons. Zoë loves third shift—or at least, she's convincing when she says she does.

Tonight the question is, "Have you ever met someone, and it was like…you just know that you were supposed to meet them?"

"I think," Nanaba says, eyebrows furrowed a little in concern, though this is certainly not the dumbest thing to ever come out of Zoë Hange's mouth, "that you need to go home after this and get some sleep."

Zoë laughs, turns her head so that the dark circles beneath her eyes aren't visible, and says, "I don't know what you're talking about."

"Sleep is good for you."

"But seriously, haven't you ever felt that way when you met someone? For the first time, I mean."

Nanaba can't say that she has. She's pretty sure Zoë's gone one too many nights without proper sleep, and that's about the only thing she's sure of. "No," she says. "Have you?"

It works like a charm. Zoë wriggles in place like a wound-up spring and nearly jumps in the air when she says, "Yes! Yesterday, I met this guy…"

And it's not anything romantic, or anything sweet, to Nanaba's surprise. Zoë's not even interested in him—at least, she doesn't act as if she is. She tells Nanaba that she met the guy at her day job; he came in with the cleanest Camaro she's ever seen. He didn't need anything fancy done, just the brake pads replaced and the oil changed. "I finished with the car and went up front, but Moblit, well, he must have taken a break for lunch, right? Because there wasn't anyone at the front desk. I took care of it. Called for Smith—you know, the guy's last name—and up steps this tall blond man."

"Handsome?" Nanaba asks.

"Yeah. He had the nicest hair and he was disgustingly nice. He even made small talk. Didn't even care that I was standing there covered in grease and stuff."

"You get his phone number?"

"Oh, no. No way." Zoë turns away again, brushing her long bangs out of her face. "You know I don't—well, don't…date. Not anymore."

Nanaba decides to avoid that subject. "So this handsome stranger… I don't understand why you'd think you were supposed to meet him if you didn't even flirt a little."

"I didn't say I didn't flirt."

Nanaba tries not to grin, but her lips start twitching and then she's turning away from Zoë under the guise of grabbing an armful of Cheez-It boxes. "Disaster zone?"

She can almost feel the heat from Zoë's cheeks from where she's standing, but when Zoë responds, her voice sounds pretty calm. "Maybe. I'm not a skilled flirt or anything. In fact, like eighty percent of the time I'm not sure it qualifies as flirting."

"Did the guy run away screaming?" Nanaba stops what she's doing to put her hands on her hips and grins.

"Not this time," Zoë says.

"Then it couldn't have been a disaster zone."

"Anyway, I don't know how to explain it. It's like I was supposed to meet this guy."

"Why, though?"

Zoë shrugs and stands on her toes to straighten things up before she rocks back onto her heels and glances over her shoulder. "I don't know. Maybe," she grins, "he'll save me from a pack of wild dogs, and then ask me to join his tennis team."

"Tennis team? That's deep stuff right there."

"Well, he didn't _say_ that he plays tennis. It was just easy to picture. He looks like the sort of guy who plays doubles on Saturday morning or something, you know? Besides, he was too fit for golf to be his sport."

* * *

Zoë's not entirely wrong. To Nanaba's surprise, almost a year later, when she and Zoë have both quit their job at the grocery for better things (at least, that's what they tell themselves), they run into one another on the street. Nanaba suggests lunch, and they head to a little place and sit in a back corner drinking sodas and eating burgers.

"You remember Mr. Camaro Guy?" Zoë asks halfway through the meal.

"Who?" Nanaba tries to wrack her brain, but she just can't picture a Camaro, let alone a guy attached to one.

"The really handsome man who brought his Camaro in for me to work on," she blabs around a mouthful of hamburger. A piece of lettuce slides out one side of the sandwich and lands, with an unpleasant sound, on her plate.

"Oh, yes. The one you were _destined_ to meet."

"I saw him again."

"Yeah? Did he ask you out?"

Zoë rolls her eyes, picks up the lettuce leaf between her thumb and forefinger, and shoves it into her mouth. "I don't think you understand what I mean when I say he's handsome. I mean, he's like movie-star handsome. He'd hate me. Everything about me."

"Well, what'd he do, bring his car in again?"

"Nope. It was a few months ago, but you remember when it was super rainy, right?" Nanaba nods, and Zoë continues, "All right, well, picture me walking in that crap home from the shop—"

"From the _shop_? Zoë, that's _miles_!"

"Well, I haven't the money for a car, the exercise is good for me, and my bicycle met a very unfortunate end when it was sideswiped by a pickup truck, but those are boring stories. Anyway, I can't remember the last time I owned an umbrella. Well, he was driving by when he saw me and stopped the car, offered me a ride."

"You didn't take it, did you?"

Zoë meant well, had meant well as long as Nanaba had known her, which wasn't really that long. Still, the other woman's nature consisted of a large percentage of curiosity and very little—it seemed to Nanaba, anyway—situational awareness. Nanaba hopes that her former work buddy didn't hop in the car with some guy she'd met once when he'd brought his car in to the shop where she worked.

"Well, no," she says, rolling her eyes and taking another bite of her sandwich. "I mean, his car was spotless. There was no way I was going to ruin his car by sitting in it. The last jackass I did that to didn't appreciate it. At all."

"Well, that jackass was a loser anyway, certainly not good enough for you."

"Yeah." Zoë finishes chewing and swallows the bite and then takes a long drink from her soda. "Anyway, Erwin tried insisting once or twice but finally gave up. It was nice of him to offer it, though."

"So how was this destined if you were going to refuse the ride, anyway?"

"I don't know. The feeling was still there, though. Like…that I was supposed to know him. Are you sure you've never had that feeling before?"

"I'm pretty sure."

Zoë doesn't continue the discussion, and Nanaba finishes her meal and parts ways with her, though not before exchanging phone numbers.

* * *

Over the next handful of years, Zoë meets other people she claims are a part of this "destiny" thing. Nanaba doesn't believe her, of course, thinks maybe she's spent too much time rolling around in engine grease to allow her brain to function normally.

Zoë's latest fascination is a short guy. "I'm supposed to know this guy, too," she texts one evening to Nanaba along with a picture. The picture's taken in the public park, it looks like, and the guy's minding his own business walking alone.

Nanaba thinks he looks like a complete and utter sourpuss.

Despite her disbelief in Zoë's destiny crap, she's not really surprised when, the next day, Zoë texts her and says that she's meeting the guy for coffee. "Because I got mud on his shoes," the text says, and there's a stupid-looking winky face that means that there's a fifty-percent chance that it was an accident and Zoë is meeting him for coffee as an apology, but passing it off to her friend as if she meant to do it.

* * *

It's kind of nice to not believe in that crap. Nanaba's fine as far as friends go. She has Zoë, of course, mostly through text messages. But there are others, too. She meets Lynne in a yoga class; Henning is a cook at a restaurant she waitresses at briefly; and Gelgar, well, Gelgar stays with Henning when things get rough for him for a while.

Nanaba's not sure how she feels about destinies, whether friendship-dictated or not.

She prefers the idea of that she makes her own friends on her own time for her own reasons—not associations born of some kind of whacked universe's idea of who should and should not be friends.

Or more than friends, as Zoë's circumstances seem to lean toward.

Even Zoë can't explain it, though.

"I just knew he was important," is all she can come up with in the end.

Nanaba has no choice but to take her friend's word for it. Why else would Zoë approach a stranger in the park on a brisk autumn afternoon—a stranger who was not especially attractive, not noticeably tall, not particularly anything but grumpy-looking?

She worries a little bit, because Zoë's dating history is absolute shit at best, and because Levi seems like bad news right from the get-go: there's a criminal record, for one, and he's not very kind.

But Zoë swears he never hits her.

He supposedly regrets his past.

And, she tells Nanaba, wakes her up in the middle of the night just to say it, voice wobbly: he's really patient, and understanding, and he won't push her into things she's not comfortable with.

Which is huge.

Nanaba knows it's huge. Zoë's dated a lot of terrible people, people who started out okay and ended up showing their true colors further down the line, after Zoë'd done something big for them, too, like moving into their apartment, or breaking off contact with her family because they didn't approve, didn't think she was smart enough to decide if a guy was worth her time or not.

After that 2:00a.m. call, Nanaba decides that, well, maybe there's something to Zoë's life, to that "destiny" thing.

She's happy for her friend, but she can't believe in it for herself. She's never felt that way before.

* * *

But then the dreams come.

They're boring dreams. Stupid, even, and they don't make any sense.

The sky's dark, and she can't turn her head to see anything else.

The stars are above, and the moon, but it's not peaceful or beautiful or romantic.

There's a sense of—of _something_. Urgency, maybe. It permeates the air and she has trouble breathing, and everything _aches_.

And then she feels it—a hand in hers.

* * *

The other dream is calmer, quieter, sweeter. She's walking through a hallway, and for some reason she thinks it's her old elementary school when she wakes up. But in the dream she has papers in one arm, and she's headed somewhere in particular because she always walks the same route. Left at the end of the corridor. Rows of doors appear, and she thinks maybe they're classrooms. She stops in front of the third door on the right, and then—

There it is again. Solid, warm, comfortable: a hand in hers.

* * *

That's all she has to go on, just a hand.

Zoë laughs when she tells her, says maybe it's her destiny, to find herself a lovely hand. Maybe it's stupid, but Nanaba thinks it's interesting. Nobody has that hand. After she has the dreams almost nightly for two months, she starts checking, staring at people's hands: Gelgar's hands are too soft, Henning's fingers are too thin, Lynne's hand is too small, Zoë's hands too rough…

She gives up, after that, but she still wonders, sometimes, whose hand it is she's holding in those dreams, and why it means so much to feel it taking hold of hers.

* * *

Nanaba ends up doing desk work for a living. It's all right. It pays well, and she doesn't have to interact with idiots day in and day out, so she considers the entire job a huge step up from any of her others.

She spends time with her friends, works the occasional weekend, and never does make a special effort to meet a significant other.

It's more energy than she's willing to spend, and dating sucks. Blind dates suck the most; she goes on three of them at the suggestion of Lynne, and all are miserable. Well, one was tolerable, but there just…wasn't anything there. They ended the evening before nine o'clock and agreed to never do it again.

* * *

Zoë calls her in the afternoon one day, out of absolutely nowhere. They've hardly spoken for weeks, because both of them have been busy with work, and in the moment it takes to slide her phone to unlock and answer it, Nanaba worries that this call will be bad news.

But it's good news.

Zoë's getting married.

Rather, she _is_ married, got herself married that day at a courthouse. But they're going to invite a bunch of friends to the park to celebrate with a potluck lunch that weekend.

Nanaba accepts right away, overtime at work be damned, and promises to bring the best cake that Zoë's ever seen, but Zoë laughs and says, "We've got the cake covered. I have a friend who does it for a living."

So Nanaba says she'll bring something else. Maybe a metric ton of hot dogs just to be funny.

Before she hangs up, she says, "Are you happy?"

And Zoë gets really quiet, sniffs once, and replies, voice really soft as if she's trying to keep someone else in the apartment from hearing her, "Nana, I didn't think anyone would ever like me enough after getting to know me to want to marry me."

And Nanaba decides that that's the best "yes" Zoë could have given her. She grins, says, "I'm glad. Now go hang out with your grumpy husband," and hangs up before she can start crying on the phone.

It's funny because Nanaba never loses her cool over anything.

But she remembers too many stories from Zoë during third shift.

And then there were times she herself had been there to witness something, like the time an angry ex-boyfriend confronted Zoë after a shift one night in the parking lot.

And she'll never forget picking up Zoë from the shadows behind a diner when she'd needed someone to come and get her after one of her relationship attempts had gone sour. That Zoë, who was spirited and enthusiastic and open, had been reduced to an embarrassed black-eyed mess… Well, it had pissed Nanaba right off for weeks afterward.

That Zoë's finally met someone who—who respects her space and trusts her and misses her when she's gone and loves her when she's there…

It's important, and wonderful, and Nanaba is relieved that Zoë felt whatever-it-was that one day in the park that made her feel like she had to talk to Levi.

* * *

The lunch in the park is a success.

Nanaba arrives with hot dogs and hamburgers and buns, and Zoë hugs her and shows off a simple wedding band, practically glowing with excitement. That alone makes it worth attending.

Zoë invites random park-goers to join them, walkers and joggers and people with dogs and kids and—

The entire place fills up with laughing people.

Nanaba meets Mr. Erwin Smith, the Camaro driver (who now drives a Corvette). She also meets a lot of other people, friends of Levi or Zoë or both; it's fascinating how they know one another, and everyone has an interesting story, some as stupid as the one Zoë likes to tell about how she met Erwin.

Petra crashed her car into Auruo's borrowed station wagon. Two years later they met Levi on the same road, but this time it was Auruo who crashed Petra's car into Levi's.

Nanaba usually doesn't like large crowds; they unsettle her.

But she doesn't mind sitting with a bunch of stranger's this time, for Zoë's sake, and maybe because the conversation is so interesting.

* * *

When it's time for cake, Zoë snatches a tall man aside and proclaims him the best baker in the city. He looks embarrassed and his entire face turns red, ears-to-nose. His hair does a pretty good job of hiding his eyes, but Nanaba thinks that despite the embarrassing praise, he looks pleased.

The cake really _is_ wonderful, though. And Nanaba takes it upon herself to find the guy responsible so that she can pester him into giving her the recipe.

"He'll never give you the recipe," Zoë says, grinning. "But you can try to wrangle it from his lips if you want. He's hiding over by those trees." She points off at some aspens, and Nanaba takes what's left of her cake and heads there immediately.

* * *

He's folded himself up in the shade of the tree and he's looking at his phone like he's desperately hoping someone on Facebook has something interesting to say.

"You a friend of Zoë's?" Nanaba asks him.

He glances up, shrugs his shoulders a bit, and says, "Yeah."

"Knowing Zoë, the way you met must be interesting."

She has no idea why she's asking, but it's a true enough statement. Zoë never meets anyone under normal circumstances, it seems.

"She put my street address into her GPS instead of Moblit's."

"That sounds like her," she laughs, and points at her plate where a half-eaten slice of cake sits, a fork shoved into it. "You made this?"

"Yeah."

"It's great. Don't tell me that you won't share the recipe."

"Trade secret," he says, but she can see the corners of his mouth lifting up.

"Oh, yeah?"

"I own a bakery."

Things snowball from there. The next thing Nanaba knows, she's introducing herself to him, and shaking his hand, and—

That's it.

That's the hand.

She doesn't say anything about it, sure he'll think she's crazy or weird or insane; one Zoë is more than enough for the world, after all.

But she does hold onto his hand a little longer than a handshake requires, and if he notices, he doesn't say a thing about it.

* * *

She decides later that he's pretty cute.

Mike, that is: Cake Guy, Maker of Fantastic Cakes.

Shaggy without looking like a hobo; Nanaba digs it more than she ought to, and the man looks good with a mustache; the way it twitches up when he smiles before his lips do is really cute.

But she doesn't believe in destiny, at least not enough to let it control her.

So she doesn't wait around in the hopes that she'll accidentally meet him again.

* * *

Mike's bakery is a cute little building; Nanaba's surprised to realize that she passes it every day on her way to work.

It's eight o'clock in the morning, and she's here to get something for the other losers that share office space with her because she's feeling unnaturally kind today, and she knows eighty percent of them skip breakfast anyway.

It's a regular Friday morning routine. The only difference is that she's at Mike's bakery instead of grabbing a box of Krispy Kreme doughnuts at a supermarket.

Maybe there will be something there between them if she runs into him, but if there's not, well, that's okay, too. At least she'll have something to give to her coworkers so they won't think anything is different.

A bell jingles softly when she opens the door. There's someone working the cash register, but she spots Mike in the back room and stands in line to wait her turn.

She orders a dozen muffins because they look disgustingly good and are probably fifty times healthier than doughnuts anyway, and she pays before she gets another good look at Mike. He's bent over a tray of something—cookies, maybe—and looks like he's concentrating hard.

She's still watching him when the cashier hands her card and receipt back to her, and just as she's starting to feel a little silly for being there, Mike lifts his head and notices her, jumps almost like he's been shot.

His face goes red.

Nanaba thinks it's pretty cute. She gives him a little wave before she takes her purchase and heads toward the door; the building is small and there are people waiting behind her; she doesn't want to hold the line up.

She isn't overly surprised when she feels a hand land on the back of her shoulder before she's even halfway to the door.

"Hey," he says. "Nanaba, right?"

She turns to smile up at him. "And you're Mike."

"Yeah." He's grinning, and looks like an absolute dope. She decides that she loves it.

"After that cake last weekend, well, I thought I'd come check you out. I mean, check out your bakery." Though both are technically true, she thinks to herself.

He looks embarrassed at the compliment, but manages to say, without stammering, "Nanaba, I was wondering…"

She decides to save him the pain of asking and hopes she's not interpreting him wrong, or she'll come off like the most egotistical thirty-year-old woman to ever live.

"Yes," she tells him, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, "I'm single and I would love to do something with you sometime."

He smiles a little smile to himself and nods as he reaches into his apron pocket, but it's obvious that he's really happy about it. "Can I get your number, then?"

She gives her phone number to him, and tells him that he can text her whenever he wants because her phone is always on silent and work gets pretty dull sometimes—not that he's a notch above dull or anything, because he's not; it's just that it's nice to have something to look forward to, is all.

She hears his laugh for the first time: it's soft and low and wonderful.

She grins as she hurries out of the bakery to avoid being late for work.

* * *

He does text her.

To ask her what she thinks of seeing a movie with him. Something simple and small, low-key and easy. If it goes badly, at least they both get a movie out of the deal.

She says yes, of course, and that very night they meet up in casual clothes and see a comedy that's not really all that funny, but Nanaba laughs anyway because there's something about sitting next to someone warm and wonderful and _almost_ familiar that makes stupid puns legitimately funny.

They go out to eat afterward, nowhere fancy because they're dressed in jeans and t-shirts. They make fun of the movie and Nanaba almost chokes on French fries when Mike tells her about how Zoë had walked right in through his front door without even knocking, took one look at him sitting on his couch in boxers, shirtless, playing _Mario _fucking _Galaxy_ on his Nintendo Wii, and had stared at him for a long minute before she'd said, "You're not Moblit."

He drives her back to her car and it's a quiet trip; it's not late, but it's not early, either, and Nanaba thinks that if Mike were dropping her off at her apartment, she'd probably invite him in.

She doesn't expect a kiss, because he seems kind of shy, or at least reserved, and she's right.

He doesn't give her a kiss.

The car makes it to the first red traffic light, though, before he reaches over and takes her hand.

It feels…nice. Natural. She thinks that maybe she understands what Zoë meant all those times when she babbled on about how she felt when she met Erwin and Levi and countless others. It's as if this is meant to be, too, and all Mike's doing is holding her hand.

So when he stops his car next to hers, she undoes her seatbelt, and before he can finish saying that he had a nice time, she's leaning across the front seat of his car to kiss him: short and sweet but with obvious interest attached.

When she pulls away, she says, taking his hand again to squeeze it, "Let's do this again sometime."

And when he asks, mustache twitching upward just a little, "The kiss or the date?" she laughs until her sides hurt and responds,

"Both, of course."


End file.
